Science Data Model

It was decided realtively early in the preparatory phase of ALMA and EVLA that the two projects would

1) use the same data analysis software (CASA) and
2) use essentially the same archive data format, the (ALMA) Science Data Model, (A)SDM.

The SDM was developed to a first prototype by Francois Viallefond (Observatoire de Paris) as an extension and full generalisation of the MeasurementSet. The SDM is superior to the MS w.r.t. the storage of observatory raw data in that it is capable of capturing the metadata of an interferometic or total-power dataset completely without any compromise including all data relevant for calibration and observatory administration.

Just like for the MS, one can think of the SDM as a relational database. And both databases have in principle a very similar layout. However, while the MS has only 12 required Subtables, the SDM uses typically 40 Subtables, and there are more optional ones.

SDMs, however, are for data storage and data reduction should be done on the MeasurementSet (although when importing data through importasdm with option lazy=True  the ASDM is restructured to resemble an MS). 

For the implementation of the SDM, (then) novel source code generation techniques were applied which permitted simultaneous implementation in Java and C++. As the actual representation of the data on disk, a hybrid format was chosen: all low-volume metadata is stored as XML files (one per table) while the bulk data is stored in a binary format (MIME) in so-called Binary Large Objects (BLOBs). In particular the Main table is stored as a series of BLOBs of a few GB each with lossless compression. This makes the SDM more efficient as a bulk data format than the MS which stores the the DATA column of the Main table as one single monolithic file.

An up to date description of the tables of the SDM is given in this pdf.

This tar file contains the XML Schema Definition (xds) files for all of the tables described in the associated SDM Short Table Description. Use "tar xvfz 0asdmSchematas_v15July2019.tgz" to extract its contents.

This tar file contains the XML Schema Definition (xds) files for all of the enumerations used by the SDM tables. Use "tar xvfz 0enumerationsSchematas.tgz" to extract its contents.

The binary data format is given in this pdf.